Night Flight

Day One: Fifty-Thousand Ugandans Become Refugees Every Night, Fleeing the Lord's Resistance Army 

Day One: Fifty-Thousand Ugandans Become Refugees Every Night, Fleeing the Lord's Resistance Army 

The hazy Ugandan moon makes them looks like zombies -- ragged shadows, shuffling down a dirt road -- and the years of fear and insecurity, ritualized by this nightly trek, may have indeed killed a little part them.  

Nancy Akwon has been coming to the shelter of this girls'  school every night for the past 15 years. She has nine children now and before darkness falls they walk the three kilometers here for nothing more than a cold, concrete floor and peace of mind.

They have good reason to make this nightly journey. In 1991 the notorious Ugandan rebel group that calls itself the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) abducted her seven-year-old son.  She says she hasn't seen him since.

"I think he's dead," she says, rocking her youngest child in her arms. "I told myself I would never let that happen to any of my other children, which is why we come here every night."  

It's called "night commuting" -- and because of the LRA's activities here and the government's anti-insurgency campaign -- it has become a nearly institutionalized phenomenon.    

An estimated 50,000 Ugandans (30,000 of them children) from four northern regions walk from their homes in outlying rural areas to what they consider safer urban centers, like the city of Kitgum. They sleep in tents, schools, porches or verandas -- wherever they can find a place to lay their heads.  

Cornelius Williams is the head of

"It's a coping strategy," he says, "and it has not led to a stable situation. Basically, it shows the failure of the state to provide security. And the people are voting with their feet."  

The insecurity stems directly from the strategy and tactics of the LRA, one of Africa's strangest and most brutal insurgent groups. In the past two decades the LRA are charged with abducting as many as 25,000 children and forcing them to join their ranks as soldiers, servants or even sex slaves. Of that number 7,500 have been girls, 1,000 returning to their families pregnant and forever stigmatized by their abductions.  

The LRA is also accused of killing and mutilating thousands more. In one particularly brutal incident they kidnapped 50 men, women and children that they said had betrayed them to the government. They cut off the nose, ears, mouth and arms of each one.

The LRA's leader and self-declared prophet Joseph Kony says he wants a government based on the Ten Commandments.

But the LRA's actions hardly reflect the spirit of the commandments.

At its peak strength in the mid- to late 1990s, the LRA was estimated to have as many as 30,000 troops, split into three "divisions": the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Despite Kony's claims of faith and his persecution of practitioners of traditional witchcraft, he has managed to meld elements of both into his movement. Christian prayers and African amulets, bibles and animist spells mix together in a mystical alchemy of terror.  

Julina Away says the LRA came to her home in the Kitgum district one night in 1990. She says they forced her, her husband and eight-year-old son Jeffrey on a grueling two-week march. She says the LRA killed her husband, then beat her.  

"They stomped on me with their boots until I  became unconscious, and then they left me for dead," she says. When she finally regained consciousness they were gone, she says, along with her son. She never saw him again.

But now she comes to the UNICEF tent shelters at the girls' school, with her daughter Concy, 21, and Concy's two-year-old daughter, Regan. Three generations of Julina's family, now forced to into a life of night commuting.

"It destroys the rhythm of the families," says Frederick Ajok, manager of the shelter. "In our culture parents spend the evenings with their children, talking with them, teaching them -- but many children come here by themselves, and if a parent is commuting, too, they're exhausted. The kids end up unsupervised."  

At another night commuter shelter at St. Joseph's Hospital, two miles away, Ajok's statements seem somewhat true. A band of about 20 boys runs around the grounds, yelling and making noise at 10 p.m., while others try to sleep anywhere they can. When the boys see the light on my camera they run up to me. They all want, naturally, to take a look and receive any kind of adult attention in their young lives, lives that have become dominated by their peers rather than parents. It reminds me of a Northern Ugandan version of "Lord of the Flies."

The boys disrupt the open-air night school class being taught by Alex Kalokwera, who looks tired after teaching full-time during the day and coming here in the evening.  He gets paid 3,000 Ugandan shillings, the equivalent of $1.50, for three hours of work each night. "I don't do it for the money," he says. "I do it for the children of Uganda. They need this. Their lives are disrupted enough."  

UNICEF's Williams says there are still serious issues of fear and insecurity from the LRA that motivate the night commuters to make their journey, but he says there are other reasons, too.  

"People sometimes want privacy," says Williams. "The thuckles (traditional grass huts) are crowded. The parents may want to have it to themselves one night, and the kids are told to go to the shelter. Others are looking for jobs from out of town and need a free place to stay. And a lot of kids use (the shelters) as a way to get away from the parents, to see their friends, get drunk and look for trouble."

Williams says many incidents of violence, even sexual assault, have occurred in the shelters. The very place where young women and girls go for protection could be the same place that houses their potential predators.

So Williams says UNICEF got involved with the shelters that had the most violent histories. "We fenced them off and created true safe havens, both physically and psychologically," he says.  

Troublemakers are now screened out by appointed night commuter leaders in each tent or building. There is also an attempt to force continuity and routine on this lifestyle of nomadic instability. For example, at UNICEF shelters commuters sleep in the same location every night. That way they know exactly who belongs and who doesn't.

Guards, as well as a detachment from the Uganda Peoples Defense Force (UPDF), patrol nearby. The commander of the UPDF's Kitgum brigade, Major Mohango, says fewer than 100 LRA members remain in his area of operations because of aggressive operations by the Ugandan military.  

"The LRA are finished," according to Mohango. "They're starving, just looking for a way to survive. They can no longer carry out their atrocities against the civilians, they can no longer abduct children and -- because they can't recruit that way -- their numbers are being depleted."

The LRA is a notoriously elusive group, however, often traveling in small groups to avoid detection. While it does appear its activity in most areas has lessened recently, there is no way to independently verify claims the LRA's numbers have dropped.

Two recent developments may boost the UPDF's efforts to capture Joseph Kony and end the LRA's reign of terror.

Earlier this month the International Criminal Court called for the arrest of Kony and four deputies, the first step toward issuing indictments.

Also, the Sudanese government has granted Uganda temporary permission to pursue Kony and the LRA deeper into southern Sudan, where he and his followers are said to be hiding.  

In the past, Sudan has allowed Uganda to go about 100 kilometers into its territory in pursuit of Kony -- up to the so-called "Red Line." Now UPDF spokesman Lt. Col. Shaban Bantariza says Sudan will allow the UPDF to go beyond that point, to use helicopter gunships and even to conduct joint operations to oust the LRA from Sudan.    

"Once he's caught," Mahonga says of Kony, "that will be the end of it all."

With tens of thousands killed and more than 1.5 million people displaced during the LRA's reign, many here hope that will soon happen.  

While agencies say the number of night commuters has fallen dramatically in recent months because of less LRA activity in the area, old patterns are hard to break.  

Nancy Akwon believes she and her nine children will probably still keep making their nightly journey for some time to come.  

"I'm not sure when things will really get better or when we'll feel safe again," she says.  

It is a legacy of terror so ingrained that it may take more than just the capture of Kony to break the tight grip of fear on northern Uganda.

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